In many system environments, configuration information is associated with two or more communicating devices. In some such systems, one device originates the configuration information, and one or more other devices use the configuration information. The configuration information is often time varying in nature. One example of such a system is a provisioned networking environment. One system in the networking environment communicates configuration information to other systems in the networking environment. The configuration information may be related, for example, to communications paths employed by users to reach an originating network element, or for service parameters associated with those paths, or the like. Such paths occur for example in various networking tunneling protocols such as MPLS, BGP VPNs, Pseudo-wire, etc.
In such systems, it would be advantageous to be able to verify that the configuration information used by a system is in fact the correct configuration information, and to verify that system connectivity is similarly correct. However, it often takes a certain amount of time for configuration changes to be distributed throughout a system. During that time, configurations may appear to be mismatched when in fact new configuration has not yet converged. What is needed is a way to verify configuration information and connectivity in a way that is tolerant of transient configuration mismatches.